It's amazing how we'll spend thousands on gear, only to have it superseded. But how long do you hang on to it?

I've got a Matrox X.100 (http://www.matrox.com/video/en/support/rtx100/rec/) which was by no means my first "real time" video editing card. Back in the glorious days of standard definition video where you custom built your computer so that the dreaded dropped frames would be avoided. Now? The computer box sits in the garage as the motherboard is now dead and not worth fixing. I still have it and the 'squid head' breakout box/cable. Still have trouble bringing myself to throw it away (yet I need to).

Anybody else got something in this category?

Andrew

I have the Matrox RT2500 which I mated with Adobe Premiere 6.5. Never could get it to run perfectly and it was just a pain in the ass. It now sits in my basement because I could not sell it and it cost too much to throw away. Ultimately I switched to Edius and swore never to buy another Matrox or Adobe product again.

This article (http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/how-the-sunk-cost-fallacy-makes-you-act-stupid.html) may help.

I wonder if my JVC HD110 falls into this category. Still a great camera and honestly 720P isn't so awful for You Tube - except lately everybody expects HD. I've got it feeding a Ninja2, so no issue with tape.

But did I say that everybody seems to expect HD???

The JVC matched a number of HD cameras in resolution.

I bought a Lightscribe writer on Craigslist for $80 back around 2010. About a month later my PC crashed & I got a new one, with a DVD burner which supposedly also burns Lightscribe as well. If needed. Honestly I've never burned one since.

I have a simple rule now. If I don't use something in 6 months then I sell it. e-Bay has become the saviour of us gear hoarders and it's amazing what people will buy and bid for ..even if it doesn't work! I had a Fuji point and shoot camera that I had bought on eBay for $60.00 and soon after the sensor chip died. Instead of tossing it in the bin I put it on eBay saying .."faulty needs sensor repair" and two people fought over the bidding and I ended up with $72.00!!

There is hope yet for you guys with old gear sitting in the basement ...put it on eBay and use the money to get some shiny new toys!!

Problem with ebay is auction fees/shipping costs. Costs a fortune to ship everything unless you're a shipping/packing expert.

Problem with craigslist is people are very flaky and also some of them like to murder you.

I have several items that are definitely worth some money that I would like to get rid of, but AT WHAT COST?

I sell a bit on Ebay and shipping is not an issue for me. I use USPS Priority mail and it is reasonably priced with tracking.

You must be dealing with smaller items.

Most services have flat rate parcel services up to around 10 lbs so I just add that to the sale. For really heavy stuff like your old U-Matic recorder that would cost more than you get for it just in shipping. I list heavy stuff as pickup only but if the buyer is prepared to pay the freight costs I'll send it anywhere!

If the item is in another city or state I'm sure the buyer has enough sense to realise that it has to be shipped and he has to pay for that shipping??

So far the items I've sold on eBay haven't had much issue with shipping costs, even from here in Hawaii.

I recently sold a teleprompter that cost the buyer more than $90 to ship. My biggest concern was making sure the fragile beamsplitter glass would be unharmed. The buyer was ecstatic at my packing job, saying I must have gotten a masters in teleprompter packing. :-)

USPS is how I ship everything. Almost all of it goes via flat rate unless it's small and/or lightweight. In which case it's sometimes cheaper to send in an ordinary box via Priority Mail.

I've been on a selling spree, clearing out as much as I can. Sold all the Nikon lenses from my years as a news photographer. They hadn't been used since 2004. Trying to sell my Norman studio strobe system. And there are several miscellaneous items which managed to find buyers at very cheap prices. The cost of mailing them was almost as much as the item itself.

But that's what's interesting about eBay. Never can tell what might sell.

if i were willing to do local/pickup only I'd just go through craigslist and cut out the middleman/fees.

I bought a Nikon D2x when it came out. Paid $4999 plus tax. I like the camera but its junk compared to the Nikon D7000 that I bought just 3 years later for $1000.
Big mistake to buy the D2x and waste of money.

I still have my first hard drive: a 100mB for my Amiga 500. I think it was $800 including the interface. I no longer have the computer but I just can't get rid of the hard drive.

I have Matrox rainbow runner, a Canon XLS, a Vivitar enlarger,Mamiya C33, Cibachrome
Wow, ya I gotta clean up.

Why clean up when you could instead charge for admission? :-P

Andrew

My Canon Optura 20. Very roughly treated yet still operates (have not tested tapes with it) but I can't get anything for it if I sell it.

My HDR-HC7 is still useful as a deck, but it has an infamous "OSS vibration" issue where if the camera gets too hot, the OSS goes supersonic. (vibrates thousands of times a second up and down.) Also, the vertical sync going to the LCD is busted.

Just putting things back in the store. Sitting there in their cases, two Sony Betacams, a BetaSP portable, a Sony camera bolted onto a Hi8 back end, a ForA switcher, a Magic Dave, various old Vinten stuff, including a Vision ped used for about 6 months. Sound equipment is in a similar state, but I just can't imagine me getting rid of it - even though so much probably wouldn't even work if I powered it up! Junk, really with no sensible value. However, my guitar collection over the same time scale is increasing in value. Odd?

It's not going to get any better, either. I recently saw on Pawn Stars a guy trying to sell a 1930s-ish 16mm camera that was in like-new condition. "I'll give you ten bucks for it," the bald guy huffed. "There's a million of them available out there."

Actually he offered $100 for the camera, but the kid who brought it in wanted $800... the rest of the Pawn crew thought it was more like worth $10, and was laughing about how much more a smart phone could do!

"Old" gear may still have some value to someone who appreciates it - there's a lot of old weird stuff on ebay, and sometimes it brings decent money, if the seller is careful in pricing, and patient (or it goes for $.99 + free shipping if the seller follows ebay "suggestions"!)...

I just recently chucked the card set for a DPS Velocity 3D realtime editing hardware...was difficult since it was $7k new. I did keep the breakout box on a shelf in my office just because it looks really cool - and makes a good stand for the Sony Hi8 shoulder cam to sit on top of. The camera has dual analog rec level meters on the side that are super neat and retro. Still have my "Snappy!" video grabber, among other museum pieces.

Thanks

Jeff

Don't I know it.


Several CP16 cams, only one worth a damn as a goer, others were for parts support and all three turned out to be non-identical.

Three Bolex H16 cams.

Four Sony half-inch EIAJ portable recorders, one camera. Only half a pair of viable heads in the lot.

Various old Betacord bits and pieces, also VHS.

A shedful of "junk", some of which occasionally goes out as movie production props. My CP16s and a Nagra IV all went out on a telemovie shoot plus the modern SI2K with an old Nikon ENG lens on it, pretending to be an SP Betacam under a hood because the producer saw it and wanted even one more cam in the shot. I pitied the poor actor having to run with it, shooting a media doorstop scene.

I was a bit vexed though. Two old dialphones were lost, stolen or whatever. I was told they had been burned in a destruct scene, despite my condition in writing being not for destruction.

I have learned - do NOT trust motion picture production companies when it comes to loaner props if you value them. They can be very "goal oriented" with a "sorry costs nothing attitude".

Rest comforted by the fact that one day, if you pop off the perch before having a big chuckout, some lucky sod will happen upon your hoard and go into great transports of joy over a "barn find".

Last week while one of our buildings was being renovated, the clean-out crew got into my stash without me being notified. Fortunately it was all taken to the warehouse for sorting, so I didn't lose anything that I wanted to keep and got a daunting and almost inaccessible space cleaned out. So on balance it was a good thing.

This was the oldest and most tightly packed storage space I had. The last couple of years I've had two panel-truck loads of all kinds of equipment and tape archives hauled away from the former editing suite and the original studio space. (Which still looks full!)

This oldest group of "stuff" was literally squirreled away in the former Postal Inspector's secret passageway system in the basement of a former 1930's Post Office that we took over in the late 1980's.
I had to turn sideways and duck my head just to move along all of it in the narrow, maze-like space.

90% of it was the carefully preserved boxes of every piece of equipment purchased from 1987 to about 2008! You know, just in case I ever needed them!!

The rest was tape archives from the late 1980's to around 2000.

Anyway, I did keep the company's first video camera from around the mid 1970's, long before I started.
Maybe it will end up in a museum of archeaology instead of technology some day.

I may have the record for most costly item per weight that was disposed of:
A 5 1/4- inch floppy diskette and the serial numbered security dongle that went with it.
It held $12,000 worth of Topas 3D animation software from 1989.

I did keep the company's first video camera from around the mid 1970's, long before I started.

During my last move to another house 2 years ago I found my first photo camera back, a practica ltl, which I got as a birthday present in the 70's, I encased it in a frame and have it on a wall in my office now. Client's that visit me sometimes ask, without me saying anything "was that your first camera?" :)

I also have some stuff here that belonged to my dad who passed a way some years ago which I gave a place in my office, they are not exactly worthless because I have used some recorders to transfer old tapes a year back but at this moment they are only collecting dust.

It's a panasonic nv-dv10000recorder, a sony ev-s1000e videohi8 recorder, a Panasonic nv hs960 super vhs recorder, a Chinon sound 8500 projector and a rollei sl81 camera.

I know I can still get money for it because some recorders are still very popular but I guess there is too much memories connected to them and who knows, one day I might find them useful again.

I just came across a Canon GL2 in great shape sitting in a file drawer.

But thanks to Kodak, Super 8mm film is back! They're releasing a new camera. I'm tempted.

Kodak Goes Retro With New Super 8 Camera - Digits - WSJ (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/01/05/kodak-goes-retro-with-new-super-8-camera/)

Still happily using my father's 1937 Zeiss folder and a 1903 8 x 10 Seneca. It's when cameras turned into computers with lenses that things started to turn to S---.

the demise of firewire was a big bummer for me
I had just assembled 4 decent firewire capable cameras and a laird firewire switcher so I could do multi camera events live switched and simultaneously burn to dvd. then hdmi arrived and for some reason I felt my dvd mobile studio was obsolete so I sold off everything and started again.

Hey Paul

If only cameras were the same as guitars! An original 1954 Fender Stratocaster .. sunburst finish ...can easily fetch more than our current stuff is worth! Current price is around $50K!!!

I have two Ikegami HL79D cameras, surplus from a local TV station, sitting on a spare desk in my office here. One actually still makes a picture, although it's fuzzy and green.

I bought most of my equipment just around 2009/2010, so it's all relatively new. I'd chalk up my junk as:

Sony 8mm Camcorder from my mid-90s college days.
External Lightscribe burner I paid $80 on craigslist for & used once.
Sony point & click camera from about 10 years ago (I would like to check, it's probably a 2MP or 4MP)
Panasonic FZ35, decent camera actually. I should try selling it.
I have a few random books which weren't helpful to me (Wordpress, Javascript). In the end I stick mainly to the Dummies books when I can.

I'm sure I have a bit more, it's probably pushed into the back of my mind refusing to admit I ever bought it.

Rest comforted by the fact that one day, if you pop off the perch before having a big chuckout, some lucky sod will happen upon your hoard and go into great transports of joy over a "barn find".

Bob, if they ever have a contest to see who writes the best image-conjuring dialog on this site, you get my vote. I've enjoyed your earthy comments many times over the years.

A 500 mb hard drive. Bought in the mid 90s for £650.

I am sure it has something interesting on it but I have no way of checking.

Charles.


What was that American expression - "we aims to please"?

I've been doing a thing on the Facebook about home invasion by the wild creatures which have for some reason become inapproppriately emboldened.

I did not know how much I have posted until someone asked me for the rights. I thought it was all gone to facebook heaven as the comments were only throwaway fodder of the moment. However, except for the first three months of a calender year, facebook has hung onto it, 32 pages worth copied and pasted back to my computer so far, mainly rubbish by my assessment but other people seem to have liked it.

So thus archived were :-

BANDICOOT BARRIO.
THE RAT WARS.
THE CAT CHRONICLES.
RAPTORS.

Do you still have the foxes near your house?

Do you still have the foxes near your house?

Yup. In fact the latest litter should be coming out of the den for the first time any day now. Both vixen and dog (female & male) come around mooching breakfast and dinner every day, and I don't mind giving it to them to encourage their hanging around because I haven't have a mouse problem for 5 years now.

Can't wait to hear what happens from the Facebook banter.

G'day, mate.

There's a few foxes up the other end of Roleystone and they are urbanised in the inner Perth suburbs.

They were not endemic to this country and are a problem with our smaller native species, which occupy your rat, rabbit, squirrel, ferret and groundhog niche. Our small creatures are pretty clueless. Foxes have been responsible for some extinctions.

In the conservation parks they put down 1080 baits to thin foxes, feral dogs and feral cats out. 1080 is a naturally occurring toxin in much of our native vegetation and the local creatures have developed some resistance to it.

The bandicoots do not lightly suffer rodents and will go them. They are rarely fast enough to catch them but occasionally will get lucky. They eat the lot except for the tail and a piece of butt around it.

Unfortunately a slow rodent is most likely a poisoned rodent. When you see black sloppy patches of turd on the pavement and bandicoots with blood on their lips, they are usually goners from eating poisoned rats.

The maggies, crows and raptors go the same way with black turdburden among the silver dollars under their perches. About three months after nesting, the sound of the moepokes, a sort of owl, moves in when the population density builds outside of the poisoned neighbourhood. They go off at night somewhat like a european cuckoo.

After a bit longer, it goes quiet. Maybe it is just a natural occurrence but it seems to coincide with seasonal rodent plagues and consequent magpie, crow and bandicoot kills.

I don't know if you've seen these or not https://www.flickr.com/photos/97903980@N05/ Most of them are taken from or near my back deck, even the bear. The raven has become quite tame and she'll take an egg from my fingers. The foxes, of course, are my favorites. The football and basketball ones are my youngest son, who despite being the #1 kicker in the state last year opted out of college to go into the U.S. Coast Guard. Anyway, you can tell I like critters as much as you do. I don't know what I'd do if I lived somewhere I couldn't enjoy them.

We can both thank the Brits for importing red foxes to our countries... they brought them so their hounds could chase them up trees and everyone, except the foxes, would have a jolly good time. But the foxes are prolific. I understand in England they've even acclimated to city life.

Kind of strayed off the original topic but words are free and I'm feeling a bit anarchic today.

Since urban land clearing and climate change have become part of the environment, there has been a change in what lives here. The red robins and blue wrens are long gone.

We now have aggressive New Holland honeyeaters in their place. Their bigger cousins, the wattle birds sound like some kid scrubbing an opened tin can end-on across a concrete path. They sound like european pheasants and may be distantly related.

We did not see much in the way of all crows when I was a kid but the bigger wheatbelt crows are now in larger numbers - smart too. They and the magpies train people, not the other way round.

White cockies ( corellas ) and pink and grey galahs again were predominently wheatbelt and northern creatures but are now common in the Perth metro, right into the city where they shred the plain trees for the prickly fruits.

Our black cockies? Well their number is pretty much up. Land clearings of critical habitat still get the greenlight and a substitute food source, the pinaster pine plantation is to be clearfelled in the pretxt of conserving the groundwater as a future resource.

It smells like one of those win-win deals politicians and businessmen cook up to their own exclusive benefit.

All those trees, some of which were used to make the masts and spars for the Endeavour replica will probably end up wasted as woodchip mulch. The pinaster and radiata pine plantations around the outer burbs of Perth were Great Depression-era make-work schemes.

When it really comes to the crunch, governments and profit-takers do not care much. When I was a kid on the old place downhill from here, the black cockies would darken the sky when a flock went over. They are savage on fruit and the growers didn't like them much.

Now with their food supplies dwindling, migratory nesting options and shooting over the years, they just meander over in their twos and threes, maybe parents and one squalling overgrown chick.

They are apparently mates for life so if one gets shot or stolen for the overseas illegal trade, that's it for the other one. It just flies around celebate for the rest of its days.

Right now, there is a big bandicoot in the kitchen stealing the catfood. The cat is getting old and weary. I have to buy moist catfood in the little riptop pails as well as the dry pellets. She was weaned on dry catfood too young before my folks got her and became wedlocked to the stuff which is not good for them.

If one forgets to lift the food after the cat is done, the bandicoots will pick a pail clean and leave bitemarks in the foil tray getting the last traces off. The old girl is too weary to go up on top of fridges now so has to be fed at floor level.

I live in hope that folk up here will embrace the red electric rat traps which do work. Poison baiting is only so good as when there are no other competing food sources and you still have to condition the rats to bait just as much as you do for trapping.

If the raptors could build up again, general yard tidyness maintained and roofspaces left open for them to patrol through, I think they would make a dent in the rat population. But whilst we have "no see no touch" phobia, poisons will remain the default choice. - Public education?? Now there's a film topic.

I am still trying to put a dent in my years-long project to digitize and archive my closet full of legacy tapes: home movies and work projects from the past 30 years. Yesterday I started on the 8mm and Hi8 tapes and was dismayed to discover that the Hi8 deck no longer worked properly (was fine 5 years ago or so, last time I tried it). So I figured, they must be going for nothing on eBay. Much to my surprise I'm seeing similar units starting at $400. Apparently owning a still-functioning unit in this format commands something of a premium. My fault for waiting so long, of course.

Charles, I'd look for a Digital-8 camcorder or two to use as a source deck.

Not only will it handle the later Digital-8mm format (if you have any of those), but (most? all?) will do a hardware conversion to firewire, greatly simplifying the capture of 8mm and Hi-8 as well, in an excellent standard-def codec.

That is, if you still have a PC or Mac capable of Firewire! Apple sells a $30 FW to Thunderbolt adapter that's worked for me on the latest Macs. On the PC side I think you're limited to desktops with an FW expansion card - no laptops.

Thanks Seth. I had actually forgotten about Digital8!

I'm fully set up to digitize from composite and s-video (still working on the vast amount of VHS and SVHS tapes in the collection) so the firewire isn't necessary for me. But it's a smart idea since that would be a later model camera than the Hi8's and thus less likely to crap out (but as I have learned, not all Digi8 camcorders played back the older formats).

Thanks Seth. I had actually forgotten about Digital8!...
Back on topic, Digital8 may have been the shortest-lived format of them all.

I recently looked for my nice Sony Studio Hi-8 deck with TBC and all; I was somewhat relieved *not* to find it! What a boat anchor. Musta' lent it to somebody. Maybe I sold it here - sorry! The next time I need it, I'll see if I can locate a Digital8 camcorder...

Charles.

The tape transport on those camera-recorders may have been similar to the Sony TCD family of DAT audio recorders. Very many of those failed due to a simple issue, drying of a lube which caused a swingarm with a guide pin on it to lock. It had a very light hairspring to return it during the eject.

The arm and pin would move in under positive mechanical pressure. On eject, the pin would not fully return due to sticky lube. The tape would load but would initially be erratic, then eventually munch the tape when ejecting it.

In the DAT TCD10 PRO series, it was a dog to get at but once freed and relubed, all was fine. If the lube is just draggy, leaving the cam in a warm place for a while before using it may help.

Hunting down a service tech with the necessary skills might be a mission now.

OhBoy another load of junk on the way out (it will never ever end)
Panny introduced their new fujifilm developed tech for a fantastic new cmos which will make even the newest cameras obsolete - excited and pissed at the same time me

Bruce, so we can expect some exciting new Hi8 cameras then...?!

Bob, thanks for that info. I have located an appropriate service facility and let's see what happens.

I can't seem to discard this thing, as it changed my professional life in such a profound way. What the hell should I do with it? I know what I should do with it -- drop it off in the recycle bin at my local Best Buy. But I haven't been able to let go of it for twenty years.

They say admitting a problem is the first step to recovery. I say "vive le DV-Rex M1!"

At least it’s small!

I’m thinking about art projects made from obsolete video technology... I think I have a couple lesser DV converters to cast in resin or whatever. In the waning days of Firewire/DV, I couldn’t find my converter. I called people I’d previously loaned it to, looked in the garage, everything! Finally I bought another ADVC100. I did the job, then found the original converter a couple days later. That was my last such project... now I have two of them!

Is there a prize?

[Oprah mode]

So, Chris, tell us how this profoundly changed your life.

[/Oprah mode]

Andrew

Easy! With that DV-Rex M1, I said goodbye to non-linear analog tape-to-tape editing, and hello to real-time digital video editing on a computer.

Up to that point I had been doing assembly edits on 3/4" U-matic, Super VHS and Hi-8, and cringing at the 2nd-generation loss of what little quality VHS had to offer on the customer copies going out the door. Ouch!

Everything changed for me with the Canon XL1 and the Canopus DV-Rex M1. Suddenly the edit master was equal in quality to the camera master; customer copies went from second-generation to first which was a huge improvement, and editing became more enjoyable and a whole lot easier.

I had never paid attention to NLE before this as it all required rendering time, and for me it was just faster to build with crash edits from tape to tape. I didn't have time for rendering and didn't give a damn about Final Cut Slow. But then Canopus came out with this card that could do cuts in real time, on a PC platform like I wanted, and that was it for me. It changed everything.

I wound up working for Canopus at trade shows and I did their US website, and I helped with their forum moderation. All of which laid the groundwork for DV Info Net.

And that's why I can't find the nerve to throw away that breakout box!

Man, I hadn't thought about all that in a long time, so thanks for asking.

Do we want to get started about my collection of obsolete video equipment ...

Sometimes you need to understand the past, to explain the technologies of today. Like drop-frame timecode.

Just yesterday I fired up my old $5,000 P4 workstation with the Matrox RT.X100 and Parhelia GPU only to discover my creative 5.1 sound system S700 has gone bad and is blowing fuses. Then I discovered my best s-VHS panasonic deck now had a terrible picture and my sony digital 8 deck with time Base corrector intermittently goes on and off.
Someone wanted a VHS to DVD transfer that would require editing and since it's still connected to most of my tape decks it would be easier to use the old system. Plus for nostalgia I wanted to use the old system I spent thousands of hours using but now sits unused.
Anyway using premier pro 2.x I captured the tape and was going to copy the avi off to my current workstation but after seeing the file was over 10GB decided hey, why don't I go ahead and do the whole project on the old system like I used to. So I plugged in some lesser speakers and got to work. So it took a minute to fumble through premiere but it all worked great, 4x3 monitors, 4x3 tv monitor and all.
Yeah it's hard to part with stuff.
I do not miss tape at all